Something doesn't add up. At his 38k CAD salary as a repairman, the entire budget of the LRT would pay for just 26 repairmen? What about the drivers, electricity, maintaining old and buying new trains?
The scope/scale of the Edmonton LRT in 1981 was tiny...a single leg starting from downtown past our two stadiums (football & hockey) and finally to a neighborhood in the northeast. Primarily built to coincide with the 1978 Commonwealth Games.
From Wikipedia: The LRT system had an estimated 18,220 weekday passenger boardings in 1978.
If I remember correctly fares ranged somewhere between 35-65 cents in those days.
The article's author probably just messed up the math somewhere. According to wikipedia, there were 18,220 daily rides in 1978 on the Edmonton LRT. If he got $900 daily and that's 20%, then there were a little under $5000 proceeds daily, so each ride would have only brought in about $0.25.
I guess most people who ride rail frequently have monthly passes, only those who use it occasionally have to buy tickets at the ticket machine. Also, isn't 25 cents a reasonable price for a single ticket, given that this was 1981?
I don't know about Edmonton/Alberta, but provincial and municipal transit in British Columbia and Vancouver (which is a separate entity but likely still benefits from provincial resources) are subsidized with taxpayer money. Fare collection supposedly makes up a minority of the funding for Vancouver's transit system.
Also, with 68 fare machines in the city in 1978, how many repairmen do you really need?
